Every Watt Counts: AMD E-350 vs. Intel Core i3-2100T. Page 9

The variety of components for small energy-efficient systems keeps growing day by day. In this review we are going to talk about energy-efficiency processors: AMD E-350 (Zacate) and Intel Core i3-2100T (Sandy Bridge). We will also discuss new Mini-ITX mainboards: Gigabyte E350N-USB3 (AMD Brazos platform) and Zotac H67-ITX WiFi (for LGA1155 processors).

3D Gaming Performance

But let’s give AMD Brazos platform a chance to rehabilitate itself. Powerful graphics core is a definite strength of AMD E-350. Intel processors, on the contrary, have graphics cores with pretty modest potential. Will the graphics component make up for the slow x86 cores in E-350? And how will enhanced Intel HD Graphics core in the Sandy Bridge processor perform against the background of AMD Radeon HD 6310? Let’s find out.

First we are going to check out the results in Futuremark 3DMark Vantage:

And things change immediately. AMD E-350 based system moves to the top of the chart yielding only to Core i3-2100T. And as we can judge by the intermediate results, AMD Radeon HD 6310 graphics core is indeed more powerful than Intel HD Graphics 1000. However, Intel wins here, because AMD E-350 scored low in the CPU test.

Now let’s take a look at the actual games:

The results are very different and obviously it is the significance of the system’s computational performance for each particular game that determines AMD’s rating. In other words, Brazos’ bottleneck in 3D games is the x86 cores that cannot fully load the graphics components of AMD E-350 in most cases. The Sandy Bridge based Core i3-2100T processor appears to be a much better-balanced solution and has no idea of the problems experienced by AMD E-350. As a result, the win in gaming tests again goes to the Intel platform, although here the advantage is no longer as overwhelming as in resource-hungry applications.